Rainbow dinosaur lives! I have been a big fan of the skip and I'm glad to see that its day has finally come. +1.
SCP-2883 / Discussion
Forum
» Per Page Discussions / Per page discussions
» SCP-2883
This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-2883.
Weird art thing does something weird to your body and it doesn't make sense until you read a cryptic note at the end. That used to do it for me. It doesn't any more.
For someone who makes art and puts it in a gallery, Trushea seems to have a pretty limited understanding of what inspires and enables artistic activity — there are plenty of creative activities that ride on verbal and analytical skills. That's not a bad thing for the article on its own (bad art can be a good article), but she does kind of get the last word on the matter, so it's somewhat disappointing to see it go unchallenged.
I don't care about the minutiae of an ischemic attack or what kinds of goggles can prevent it, and the reason that particular mechanism is used seems to be to support a 'left brain vs right brain' theme that's just sort of along for the ride.
Is the final line an SCP-2808 reference?
if your reading this your gay
Kinda seconding cww here. It's still got the same issues as when I first reviewed it, namely that a dinosaur doesn't feel like it has much to do with the act of inspiring creativity. The minutiae about what works and what doesn't work when you look at it are minor distractions.
It's not technically bad, but it doesn't feel like it fits together as a fictional art piece.
edit: fwiw, the technical language is good here and helps make a boring effect marginally interesting through elaboration.
For starters, the right brain/left brain thing, much like the 10% of your brain thing, is more pop culture than actual science. I can feel the "but it's anomalous" rejoinder coming in response, but that's pretty glaring disregard for science, which is an immersion killer.
This article has the feeling of being a delivery system for the image. There's a random, "thing what does a thing" quality to this that's been mentioned up thread, and there's no real thematic resonance to make this hang together at all. If there's a unifying feature at all here, it's likely "thing what's designed to appeal to the chat room as a cute pet."
Those two factors are enough for a downvote on their own, but the biggest flaw, to me, is yet another deployment of anomalous art to teach hamfisted lessons. I'm actually a little surprised this isn't a AWCY article, because this sort of low level terrorism with a veneer of art over it is what I tend to associate with them. I've never been a huge fan of transcending reality in order to pull what amounts to a glorified prank, and that really robs this of any chance to make a literary impact of any sort.
I understand that there are many popular culture assumptions about what parts of the brain do what, but I do know of multiple cases wherein failure of the left side of the brain produced effects similar to those described here. I understand that different people have brains that function differently, but I can think of several scenarios where these effects have occured
Downvoted for many of the same reasons, but I'll vouch for the right brain/left brain thing with a huge cavat that the "left brain logic, right brain creative" thing is bunk.
There are major differences, though- The left brain is talkative and flighty, and likes to use "pigeonhole" definitions to define everything simply and quickly. The right brain on the other hand, is dispassionate, analytical, visual, and works on a concrete part-to-whole basis.
The source of the myth of the right brain being the creative one seems to be something fairly well noted among visual artists- it's hard to talk when you're painting or drawing, because you have to let your right brain dominate for a while so you can analyze what's actually there and process it into collections of marks. You don't totally turn off the left brain, because you still need its abstract emotional thinking, but you do have to get it to shut up and ignore its habit of thinking in terms of words, cartoon suns, and stick figures.
Creativity meanwhile, is largely how well you get the two to argue constructively with one another.
I was more going off personal testing (I've had brain scans done that showed that the right side of my brain was hyperactive and the left side was not, and I consider myself to be a creative person) information from a stroke victim who could only use the right side of her brain, and phenomena related to split brain
That much made sense to me. If you believe the "left brain = logic, right brain = creativity" myth, then you might try shutting down the left brain, but in the process, just remove the ability to speak and not actually help creativity at all. So, really, that's okay. It just means Miranda N. Trushea doesn't know neurology.
The second note, the one without art, is interesting, and a good thing to have in the description.
While that is certainly an impressive image, and I can get behind the effect (well-written as it is, you can do a better job tying the object to its properties) this seems like AWCY in everything but name.
It's not the type of story I'm really a fan of.
(I made a few grammar edits. Sorry if that feels intrusive!)
I'm going to no-vote. I'll second (sixth?) the opinion that the idea doesn't have a huge amount going for it, for all the reasons mentioned above. Regarding the science, I'm of two minds about it. (Pun accidental.) "Sudden artistic output" is a very rare but observed complication of brain injury, so it's not like you're plucking this phenomenon totally out of the air. Additionally, you've deployed a really pleasing amount of medical concepts and terminology to describe it - seriously, well done. It does, however, seem to me that you're shoehorning in your personal experiences and biases about left vs. right brains. The actual neurology of creativity is not well understood.
If you do really want to start getting technical about this idea - which I would actively encourage - you can cover your ass pretty easily. There are so many bits of the brain associated with """""creativity""""" that you could reference a few of them and couch it with some medically plausible admission of ignorance from Foundation scientists. e.g. after researching around this (weirdly poorly written) blog post that was the first result on Google, you could say "dynamic MRI scans of the ischemic event provide images that vary strongly between individuals, although increased regional cerebral blood flow to the [hippocampus/angular gyrus/parahippocampal gyrus/insert brain areas here] is consistently observed". You could always subtly reference the right/left brain thing by specifying the "right hippocampus" etc. if you really wanted to, and, hey, maybe big individual differences would be an metaphor for the fact that different artists will have had different paths to their creative awakenings?… amirite?…
But the main reason I'm not downvoting is that it's pretty well-written and pretty well-structured. I didn't actively dislike reading it. (Such gushing praise!)
Also, it might have been interesting to tell as more about this fun little crystal dinosaur that walks around. You can definitely squeeze more than one paragraph out of that endearing little guy.
I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, it's a big colorful dinosaur, and that's an immediate plus, but on the other, its effect doesn't really grab me in any meaningful way.
Also, the footnotes feel kind of awkward and add a bit of redundancy where it could stand to be lost. For example, you have a footnote following the mention of the arteries that are contracted that clarifies their purpose. However, you then immediately say what the effect of their contraction is, making their purpose obvious, meaning that the footnote is entirely unnecessary. It really just kinda pulls you out of the flow of reading. The rest of the footnotes are, like I said, just pretty awkward and feel kind of unnecessary, especially the one linking to wikipedia - while this is for entertainment purposes, SCP articles should generally aim to achieve a more scientific appearance, which means linking to wikipedia is something of a faux pas. Anyone who doesn't know what Avialae is can easily look it up themselves.
Also, and I don't mean to be a pedant but I'm on mobile and can't edit myself and am concerned nobody else might spot this, it's "Broca's region," not "the Boca's region." Spelling aside, no article is necessary there. And the effects of damage to Broca's area are a tad oversimplified, although that's probably nitpicking.
Unfortunately, I'm not seeing any notable changes from when I reviewed this in chat. I can't help but draw comparisons to AWCY, and the shallow context for the concept you presented doesn't address the similarities or take advantage of them.
Would enjoy seeing this rewritten somehow, AWCY has been at a slump for a while.
If this was tweaked with an AWCY? slant it would be way better in my opinion.
At the very least I can say that I really like this design and I'm definitely going to bookmark this page.
/forum/t-1874638/scp-2883#post-
page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
